On his book Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Author, Spy
Cover Interview of June 08, 2011
The wide angle
Edward Bancroft’s story offers new perspectives on a variety of topics: the history of espionage, French involvement in the American Revolution, the operation of the British government, and the character of persons like Franklin, Adams, and John Paul Jones.
I am not a theoretical kind of historian. I don’t have big conceptual paradigms through which I view the world. Through my career I have gravitated toward various topics that have caught my interest and used thorough research and sound analysis to reach conclusions.
When I started my career in the late 1970s, as a freshly-minted Ph.D., I specialized in the economic and financial history of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France. I wrote two books on that topic—admittedly, not of the sort to land on the New York Times bestseller list.
In the late 1980s and 1990s I switched to late eighteenth-century France and wrote two books dealing with French involvement in the American Revolution. It was while doing research on those projects that I discovered Edward Bancroft.
I began to take notes whenever I found information on him, and I tucked Edward Bancroft in the back of my mind for future reference. For six years I directed my university’s summer program in Oxford, and that experience took me into yet a different research direction. I ended up writing a book on the history of American Rhodes Scholars.
After finishing that project I longed to return to my “home” in the eighteenth century. I checked around with various historian friends and found that the intriguing story of Edward Bancroft still had not been grabbed. The rest, as they say, is history.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
The wide angle
Edward Bancroft’s story offers new perspectives on a variety of topics: the history of espionage, French involvement in the American Revolution, the operation of the British government, and the character of persons like Franklin, Adams, and John Paul Jones.
I am not a theoretical kind of historian. I don’t have big conceptual paradigms through which I view the world. Through my career I have gravitated toward various topics that have caught my interest and used thorough research and sound analysis to reach conclusions.
When I started my career in the late 1970s, as a freshly-minted Ph.D., I specialized in the economic and financial history of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France. I wrote two books on that topic—admittedly, not of the sort to land on the New York Times bestseller list.
In the late 1980s and 1990s I switched to late eighteenth-century France and wrote two books dealing with French involvement in the American Revolution. It was while doing research on those projects that I discovered Edward Bancroft.
I began to take notes whenever I found information on him, and I tucked Edward Bancroft in the back of my mind for future reference. For six years I directed my university’s summer program in Oxford, and that experience took me into yet a different research direction. I ended up writing a book on the history of American Rhodes Scholars.
After finishing that project I longed to return to my “home” in the eighteenth century. I checked around with various historian friends and found that the intriguing story of Edward Bancroft still had not been grabbed. The rest, as they say, is history.